Nine years after graduating from UCLA, Iva Toguri D’Aquino
became the seventh person to be convicted of treason against the
United States, charged with disloyalty for her presence as a radio
personality on a Japanese station during World War II.
When she was tried in San Francisco in 1949, people lined up
around the block to watch the proceedings, said Naoko Shibusawa, a
professor of history at Brown University.
A graduate of the UCLA class of 1940, she was known commonly as
Tokyo Rose, her Japanese radio personality, while she identified
herself as Orphan Ann. She died of natural causes at age 90 on
Tuesday as Iva Toguri D’Aquino.
She consistently maintained that she was innocent of any
disloyalty against the United States.
It took nearly 20 years ““ six of those spent in prison
““ and requests aimed at three different presidents before the
charges were repealed after it was proven that the claims against
her were fabricated and two primary witnesses had lied, said Lane
Hirabayashi, Aratani-endowed chair in the Asian American studies
department at UCLA, who referred to her simply as Toguri or Iva
Toguri.
On his last day in office in 1977, President Gerald Ford granted
D’Aquino a pardon.
D’Aquino was an American citizen born and educated in
Southern California who found herself stuck in Japan without a
passport after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.
Unable to return to the U.S., D’Aquino took a job at NHK,
the state-run Japanese radio station, which broadcast anti-American
propaganda to U.S. soldiers stationed in the Pacific.
There she became the infamous Tokyo Rose.
“She was the radio announcer who introduced songs,”
said Shibusawa, who recently wrote a book titled
“America’s Geisha Ally,” which includes a chapter
on Tokyo Rose.
Shibusawa said D’Aquino had a sweet, all-American voice
that enraptured men.
“GIs started this idea of a seductress siren calling out,
… talking to them, telling them their ship is going to sink,
their wives aren’t being faithful,” Shibusawa said.
D’Aquino’s role as a so-called propagandist for the
Japanese cause was publicized in a Cosmopolitan article after the
war, and when she returned to the United States she was arrested
and tried for treason.
Though the character of Tokyo Rose was actually several
different women who spoke over NHK during the war, they were all
distilled into the body of D’Aquino.
But there was much more behind D’Aquino’s conviction
than words broadcast over Japanese airwaves.
Post-war hysteria, ethnic prejudice, Cold-War fear and
mainstream views of femininity played into her conviction,
Shibusawa said.
“There’s this idea of this Asian, Oriental
seductress weakening men’s wills,” Shibusawa said,
adding that during the trial much of the news coverage included
descriptions of her appearance, the way she carried herself, and
other descriptions not often applied to men.
The conviction came at a time when there was suspicion of
foreigners ““ especially Japanese ““ and people were
looking for someone to punish.
She was “a scapegoat because of prejudice and the
(wartime) hysteria,” Hirabayashi said.
Though there may not currently be public trials of young women
charged with treason, Hirabayashi said the times are not so
different as they might seem.
“Reading about the Toguri case again this morning reminded
me that the wartime situation is one where the loyalty of ethnic
minorities can be questioned,” he said.
“Today, with the war and with everything going on in the
Middle East and deployed soldiers over there, there’s kind of
been a return to the 1940s, where people are sometimes suspicious
of ethnic minorities and their loyalty to the United States,”
he added.
D’Aquino’s appeal, which was granted after she had
attempted three times to gain the sympathy of an American
president, was also partially a product of the times, Hirabayashi
said.
The appeal was granted during the same years as the Japanese
community was gaining redress and reparations ““ an official
apology from the U.S. for the mass incarcerations during the war
years and monetary compensation, he said.
“This is post-civil-rights, … post-feminism,”
Hirabayashi said. “All the sorts of social-justice movements
(were) happening so there was a sense of a need to redress
grievances,” Shibusawa said.
D’Aquino spent the years following her release from prison
in Chicago, the Associated Press reported. But though she was
pardoned in the end, Shibusawa said the ordeal had a very big
impact on her life ““ she lost her husband and miscarried
during the period immediately after her return to the United
States.
“It’s a really sad story actually, to tell you the
truth,” Shibusawa said.
With reports from Bruin wire services.